A Place Called Here
Cecelia Ahern

Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2006

This edition published by Harper 2016

Copyright © Cecelia Ahern 2006

Cover design by Heike Schüssler © HarperCollinsPublishers 2016

Cecelia Ahern asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007198917

Ebook Edition © May 2016 ISBN: 9780007279395

Version: 2017-05-20

Praise for Cecelia Ahern

‘Cecelia Ahern’s novels are like a box of emeralds … they are, one and all, dazzling gems’

Adriana Trigiani, author of The Shoemaker’s Wife

‘Beautiful and unexpected … both thought-provoking and life-affirming’

Sunday Express

‘Intricate and emotional … really completely lovely’

Grazia

‘A wry, dark drama’

Daily Mail

‘Life-affirming, warm and wise’

Good Housekeeping

‘Cecelia Ahern is an undisputed master when it comes to writing about relationships … Moving, real and exquisitely crafted.’

Heat

‘Exceptional … both heartbreaking and uplifting’

Daily Express

‘Both moving and thought-provoking’

Irish Independent

‘An exquisitely crafted and poignant tale about finding the beauty that lies within the ordinary. Make space for it in your life’

Heat

‘An unusual and satisfying novel’

Woman

‘Ahern cleverly and thoughtfully turns the tables, providing thought-provoking life lessons.’

Sunday Express

‘An intriguing, heartfelt novel, which makes you think about the value of life’

Glamour

‘Insightful and true’

Irish Independent

‘Ahern demonstrates a sure and subtle understanding of the human condition and the pleasures and pains in relationships’

Barry Forshaw

‘Utterly irresistible … I devoured it in one sitting’

Marian Keyes

‘The legendary Ahern will keep you guessing … a classic’

Company

Dedication

For you, Dad –

with all my love.

Per ardua surgo

Epigraph

A missing person is anyone whose whereabouts are unknown whatever the circumstances of disappearance. The person will be considered ‘missing’ until located and his/her wellbeing, or otherwise, established.

An Garda Síochána

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise for Cecelia Ahern

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty One

Chapter Twenty Two

Chapter Twenty Three

Chapter Twenty Four

Chapter Twenty Five

Chapter Twenty Six

Chapter Twenty Seven

Chapter Twenty Eight

Chapter Twenty Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty One

Chapter Thirty Two

Chapter Thirty Three

Chapter Thirty Four

Chapter Thirty Five

Chapter Thirty Six

Chapter Thirty Seven

Chapter Thirty Eight

Chapter Thirty Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty One

Chapter Forty Two

Chapter Forty Three

Chapter Forty Four

Chapter Forty Five

Chapter Forty Six

Chapter Forty Seven

Chapter Forty Eight

Chapter Forty Nine

Chapter Fifty

Chapter Fifty One

Chapter Fifty Two

Chapter Fifty Three

Chapter Fifty Four

Chapter Fifty Five

Acknowledgements

Keep Reading …

About the Author

Also by Cecelia Ahern

About the Publisher

1

Jenny-May Butler, the little girl who lived across the road from me, went missing when I was a child.

The Gardaí launched an investigation, which led to their lengthy public search for her. For months every night the story was on the news, every day it was on the front pages of the papers, everywhere it was discussed in every conversation. The entire country pitched in to help; it was the biggest search for a missing person I, at ten years of age, had ever seen, and it seemed to affect everyone.

Jenny-May Butler was a blonde-haired, blue-eyed beauty, who smiled and beamed from the TV screen into the living room of every home around the country, causing eyes to fill with tears and parents to hug their children that extra bit tighter before they sent them off to bed. She was in everyone’s dreams and everyone’s prayers.

She too was ten years old, and in my class at school. I used to stare at the pretty photograph of her on the news every day and listen to the reporters speak about her as though she was an angel. From the way they described her, you never would have known that she threw stones at Fiona Brady during yard time when the teacher wasn’t looking, or that she called me a ‘frizzy-haired cow’ in front of Stephen Spencer just so he would fancy her instead of me. No, for those few months she had become the perfect being and I didn’t think it fair to ruin that. After a while even I forgot about all the bad things she’d done because she wasn’t just Jenny-May any more: she was Jenny-May Butler, the sweet missing girl from the nice family who cried on the nine o’clock news every night.

She was never found – not her body, not a trace of her; it was as though she had disappeared into thin air. No suspicious characters had been seen lurking around, no CCTV was available to show her last movements. There were no witnesses, no suspects; the Gardaí had questioned everyone possible. The street became suspicious, its inhabitants calling friendly hellos to one another on the way to their cars in the early morning but all the time wondering, second-guessing, and visualising surprisingly distorted thoughts they couldn’t help about their neighbours. Washing cars, painting picket fences, weeding the flowerbeds, and mowing lawns on Saturday mornings while surreptitiously looking around the neighbourhood brought shameful thoughts. People were shocked at themselves, angry that this incident had perverted their minds.

Pointed fingers behind closed doors couldn’t give the Gardaí any leads; they had absolutely nothing to go on but a pretty picture.

I always wondered where Jenny-May went, where she had disappeared to, how on earth anyone could just vanish into thin air without a trace without someone knowing something.

At night I would look out my bedroom window and stare at her house. The porch light was always on, acting as a beacon to guide Jenny-May home. Mrs Butler couldn’t sleep any more, and I could see her perpetually perched on the edge of her couch, as though she was on her marks waiting for the pistol to be fired. She would sit in her living room, looking out the window, waiting for someone to call by with news. Sometimes I would wave at her and she’d wave back sadly. Most of the time she couldn’t see past her tears.

Like Mrs Butler, I wasn’t happy with not having any answers. I liked Jenny-May Butler a lot more when she was gone than when she was here and that also interested me. I missed her, the idea of her, and wondered if she was somewhere nearby, throwing stones at someone else and laughing loudly, but that we just couldn’t find her or hear her. I took to searching thoroughly for everything I mislaid after that. When my favourite pair of socks went missing I turned the house upside down while my worried parents looked on, not knowing what to do but eventually settling on helping me.

It disturbed me that frequently my missing possessions were nowhere to be found and on the odd time that I did find them, it disturbed me that, in the case of the socks, I could only ever find one. Then I’d picture Jenny-May Butler somewhere, throwing stones, laughing and wearing my favourite socks.

I never wanted anything new; from the age of ten, I was convinced that you couldn’t replace what was lost. I insisted on things having to be found.

I think I wondered about all those odd pairs of socks as much as Mrs Butler worried about her daughter. I too stayed awake at night, running through all the unanswerable questions. Each time my lids grew heavy and neared closing, another question would be flung from the depths of my mind, forcing my lids to open again. Much-needed sleep was kept at bay and each morning I was more tired yet none the wiser.

Perhaps this is why it happened to me. Perhaps because I had spent so many years turning my own life upside down and looking for everything, I had forgotten to look for myself. Somewhere along the line I had forgotten to figure out who and where I was.

Twenty-four years after Jenny-May Butler disappeared, I went missing too.

This is my story.

2

My life has been made up of a great many ironies. My going missing only added to an already very long list.

First, I’m six foot one. Ever since I was a child I’ve been towering over just about everyone. I could never get lost in a shopping centre like other kids; I could never hide properly when playing games; I was never asked to dance at discos; I was the only teenager that wasn’t aching to buy her first pair of high heels. Jenny-May Butler’s favourite name for me – well, certainly one of her top ten – was ‘daddy-longlegs’ which she liked to call me in front of large crowds of her friends and admirers. Believe me, I’ve heard them all. I was the kind of person you could see coming from a mile away: I was the awkward dancer on the dance floor, the girl at the cinema that nobody wanted to sit behind, the one in the shop that rooted for the extra-long-legged trousers, the girl in the back line of every photograph. You see, I stick out like a sore thumb. Everyone who passes me, registers me and remembers me. But despite all that, I went missing. Never mind the odd socks, never mind Jenny-May Butler; how a throbbing sore thumb on a hand so bland couldn’t be seen was the ultimate icing on the cake. The mystery that beat all mysteries was my own.

The second irony is that my job was to search for missing persons. For years I worked as a garda. With a desire to work solely on missing persons cases, but without working in an actual division assigned to these, I had to rest solely upon the ‘luck’ of coming across these cases. You see, the Jenny-May Butler situation really sparked off something inside me. I wanted answers, I wanted solutions and I wanted to find them all myself. I suppose my searching became an obsession. I looked around the outside world for so many clues I don’t think that I once thought about what was going on inside my own head.

In the Guards sometimes we found missing people in a state I won’t ever forget for the rest of this life and far into the next, and then there were the people who just didn’t want to be found. Often we uncovered only a trace, too often not even that. Those were the moments that drove me to keep looking far beyond my call of duty. I would investigate cases long after they were closed, stay in touch with families long after I should. I realised I couldn’t go on to the next case without solving the previous, with the result that there was too much paperwork and too little action. And so knowing that my heart lay only in finding the missing, I left the Gardaí and I searched in my own time.

You wouldn’t believe how many people out there wanted to search as much as I did. The families always wondered what my reason was. They had a reason, a link, a love for the missing, whereas my fees were barely enough for me to get by on, so if it wasn’t monetary, what was my motivation? Peace of mind, I suppose. A way to help me close my eyes and sleep at night.

How can someone like me, with my physical attributes and my mental attitude, go missing?

I’ve just realised that I haven’t even told you my name. It’s Sandy Shortt. It’s OK, you can laugh. I know you want to. I would too if it wasn’t so bloody heartbreaking. My parents called me Sandy because I was born with a head of sandy-coloured hair. Pity they didn’t foresee that my hair would turn as black as coal. They didn’t know either that those cute podgy little legs would soon stop kicking and start growing at such a fast rate, for so long. So Sandy Shortt is my name. That is who I am supposed to be, how I am identified and recorded for all time, but I am neither of those things. The contradiction often makes people laugh during introductions. Pardon me if I fail to crack a smile. You see, there’s nothing funny about being missing and I realised there’s nothing very different about being missing: every day I do the same as I did when I was working. I search. Only this time I search for a way back to be found.

I have learned one thing worth mentioning. There is one huge difference in my life from before, one vital piece of evidence. For once in my life I want to go home.

What bad timing to realise such a thing. The biggest irony of all.

3

I was born and reared in County Leitrim in Ireland, the smallest county in the country with a population of about 25,000. Once the county town, Leitrim has the remains of a castle and some other ancient buildings, but it has lost its former importance and dwindled to a village. The landscape ranges from bushy brown hills to majestic mountains with yawning valleys and countless picturesque lakes. But for a two mile coastal outlet on Donegal Bay, Leitrim is all but landlocked, bounded to the west by Sligo and Roscommon, to the south by Roscommon and Longford, to the east by Cavan and Fermanagh, and to the north by Donegal. When there, I feel it brings on a sudden feeling of claustrophobia and an overwhelming desire for solid ground.

There’s a saying about Leitrim and that is that the best thing to come out of Leitrim is the road to Dublin. I finished school when I was seventeen, applied for the Guards and I eventually got myself on that road to Dublin. Since then I have rarely travelled back. Once every two months I used to visit my parents in the three-bedroom terraced house in a small cul-de-sac of twelve houses where I grew up. The usual intention was to stay for the weekend but most of the time I only lasted a day, using an emergency at work as the excuse to grab my unpacked bag by the door and drive, drive, drive very fast on the best thing to come out of Leitrim.

I didn’t have a bad relationship with my parents. They were always so supportive, even ready to dive in front of bullets, into fires and off mountains if it meant my happiness. The truth is they made me uneasy. In their eyes I could see who they saw and I didn’t like it. I saw my reflection in their expressions more than in any mirror. Some people have the power to do that, to look at you and their faces let you know exactly how you’re behaving. I suppose it was because they loved me, but I couldn’t spend too much time with people who loved me because of those eyes, because of that reflection.

Ever since I was ten they had tiptoed around me, watched me warily. They had pretend conversations and false laughs that echoed around the house. They would try to distract me, create an ease and normality in the atmosphere, but I knew that they were doing it and why, and it only made me aware that something was wrong.

They were so supportive, they loved me so much and each time the house was about to be turned upside down for yet another gruelling search they never gave in without a pleasant fight. Milk and cookies at the kitchen table, the radio on in the background and the washing machine going, all to break the uncomfortable silence that would inevitably ensue.

Mum would give me that smile, that smile that didn’t reach her eyes, the smile that made her back teeth clench and grind when she thought I wasn’t looking. With forced easiness in her voice and that forced face of happiness, she would cock her head to one side, try not to let me know she was studying me intently and say, ‘Why do you want to search the house again, honey?’ She always called me ‘honey’, like she knew as much as I did that I was no more Sandy Shortt than Jenny-May Butler an angel.

No matter how much action and noise had been created in the kitchen to avoid the uncomfortable silence, it didn’t seem to work. The silence drowned it all out.

My answer: ‘Because I can’t find it, Mum.’

‘What pair are they?’ – the easy smile, the pretence that this was a casual conversation and not a desperate attempt at interrogation to find out how my mind worked.

‘My blue ones with the white stripes,’ I answered on one typical occasion. I insisted on bright coloured socks, bright and identifiable so that they could be easily found.

‘Well, maybe you didn’t put both of them in the linen basket, honey. Maybe the one you’re looking for is somewhere in your room.’ A smile, trying not to fidget, swallow hard.

I shook my head. ‘I put them both in the basket, I saw you put them both in the machine and only one came back out. It’s not in the machine and it’s not in the basket.’

The plan to have the washing machine switched on as a distraction backfired and was then the focus of attention. My mum tried not to struggle with losing that placid smile as she glanced at the overturned basket on the kitchen floor, all her folded clothes scattered and rolled in messy piles. For one second she let the façade drop. I could have missed it with a blink but I didn’t. I saw the look on her face when she glanced down. It was fear. Not for the missing sock, but for me. She quickly plastered the smile on again, shrugging like it was all no big deal.

‘Perhaps it blew away in the wind. I had the patio door open.’

I shook my head.

‘Or it could have fallen out of the basket when I carried it over from there to there.’

I shook my head again.

She swallowed and her smile tightened. ‘Maybe it’s caught up in the sheets. Those sheets are so big; you’d never see a little sock hidden in there.’

‘I already checked.’

She took a cookie from the centre of the table and bit down hard, anything to take the smile off her aching face. She chewed for a while, pretending not to be thinking, pretending to listen to the radio and humming the tune of a song she didn’t even know. All to fool me into thinking there was nothing to be worried about.

‘Honey,’ she smiled, ‘sometimes things just get lost.’

‘Where do they go when they’re lost?’

‘They don’t go anywhere,’ she smiled. ‘They are always in the place we dropped them or left them behind. We’re just not looking in the right area when we can’t find them.’

‘But I’ve looked in all the places, Mum. I always do.’

I had, I always did. I turned everything upside down; there was no place in the small house that ever went untouched.

‘A sock can’t just get up and walk away without a foot in it,’ Mum false-laughed.

You see, just like how Mum gave up right there, that’s the point when most people stop wondering, when most people stop caring. You can’t find something, you know it’s somewhere and even though you’ve looked everywhere there’s still no sign. So you put it down to your own madness, blame yourself for losing it and eventually forget about it. I couldn’t do that.

I remember my dad returning from work that evening to a house that had been literally turned upside down.

‘Lose something, honey?’

‘My blue sock with the white stripes,’ came my muffled reply from under the couch.

‘Just the one again?’

I nodded.

‘Left foot or right foot?’

‘Left.’

‘OK, I’ll look upstairs.’ He hung his coat on the rack by the door, placed his umbrella in the stand, gave his flustered wife a tender kiss on the cheek and an encouraging rub on the back and then made his way upstairs. For two hours he stayed in my parents’ room, looking, but I couldn’t hear him moving around. One peep through the keyhole revealed a man lying on his back on the bed with a face cloth over his eyes.

On my visits in later years they would ask the same easy-going questions that were never intended to be intrusive, but to someone who was already armoured up to her eyeballs they felt as such.

‘Any interesting cases at work?’

‘What’s going on in Dublin?’

‘How’s the apartment?’

‘Any boyfriends?’

There were never any boyfriends; I didn’t want another pair of eyes as telling as my parents’ haunting me day in and day out. I’d had lovers and fighters, boyfriends, men-friends and one-night-only friends. I’d tried enough to know that anything long term wasn’t going to work. I couldn’t be intimate; I couldn’t care enough, give enough or want enough. I had no desire for what these men offered, they had no understanding of what I wanted, so tight smiles all round while I told my parents that work was fine, Dublin was busy, the apartment was great and no, no boyfriends.

Every single time I left the house, even the times when I cut my visits short, Dad would announce proudly that I was the best thing to come out of Leitrim.

The fault never lay with Leitrim, nor did it with my parents. They were so supportive, and I only realise it now. I’m finding that with every passing day, that realisation is so much more frustrating than never finding anything.

4

When Jenny-May Butler went missing, her final insult was to take a part of me with her. I think we’ve established that after her disappearance there was a part of me that was missing. The older I got, the taller I got, the more that hole within me stretched until it was gaping throughout my adult life, like a wide-eyed jaw-dropping fish on ice. But how did I physically go missing? How did I get to where I am now? First question and most importantly, where am I now?

I’m here and that’s all I know.

I look around and search for familiarity. I wander constantly and search for the road that leads out of here but there isn’t one. Where is here? I wish I knew. It’s cluttered with personal possessions: car keys, house keys, mobile phones, handbags, coats, suitcases adorned with airport baggage tickets, odd shoes, business files, photographs, tin openers, scissors, earrings scattered among the piles of missing items that glisten occasionally in the light. And there are socks, lots of odd socks. Everywhere I walk, I trip over the things that people are probably still tearing their hair out to find.

There are animals too. Lots of cats and dogs with bewildered little faces and withering whiskers, no longer identical to their photos on small-town telephone poles. No offers of rewards can bring them back.

How can I describe this place? It’s an in-between place. It’s like a grand hallway that leads you nowhere, it’s like a banquet dinner of leftovers, a sports team made up of the people never picked, a mother without her child, it’s a body without its heart. It’s almost there but not quite. It’s filled to the brim with personal items yet it’s empty because the people who own them aren’t here to love them.

How did I get here? I was one of those disappearing joggers. How pathetic. I used to watch all those B-movie thrillers and groan every time the credits opened at the early morning crime scene of a murdered jogger. I thought it foolish that women went running down quiet alleyways during the dark hours of the night, or during the quiet hours of the early morning, especially when a known serial killer was on the prowl. But that’s what happened to me. I was a predictable, pathetic, tragically naïve early morning jogger, in a grey sweat suit and blaring headphones, running alongside a canal in the very early hours of the morning. I wasn’t abducted, though; I just wandered onto the wrong path.

I was running along an estuary, my feet pounding angrily against the ground as they always did, causing vibrations to jolt through my body. I remember feeling beads of sweat trickling down my forehead, the centre of my chest and down my back. The cool breeze combined to cause a light shiver to embrace my body. Every single time I remember that morning I have to fight the urge to call out to myself and warn me not to make the same mistake. Sometimes in that memory, on more blissful days, I stay on the same path, but hindsight is a wonderful thing. How often we wish we’d stayed on the same path.

It was five forty-five on a bright summer’s morning; silent apart from the theme tune to Rocky spurring me on. Although I couldn’t hear myself I knew my breathing was heavy. I always pushed myself. Whenever I felt I needed to stop I made myself run faster. I don’t know if it was a daily punishment or the part of me that was keen to investigate, to go new places, to force my body to achieve things it had never achieved before.

Through the darkness of the green and black ditch beside me, I spotted a water-violet up ahead, submerged. I remember my dad telling me as a little girl, lanky, with black hair, and embarrassed by my contradictory name, that the water-violet was misnamed too because it wasn’t violet at all. It was lilac-pink with a yellow throat but even still, wasn’t it beautiful and did that make me want to laugh? Of course not, I’d shaken my head. I watched it from far away as it got closer and closer, telling it in my mind, I know how you feel. As I ran I felt my watch slide off my wrist and fall against the trees on the left. I’d broken the clasp of the watch the very first moment I’d wrapped it around my wrist and since then it occasionally unlatched itself and fell to the floor. I stopped running and turned back, spotting it lying on the damp estuary bank. I leaned my back against the rugged dark brown bark of an alder and, while taking a breather, noticed a small track veering off to the left. It wasn’t welcoming, it wasn’t developed as a rambler’s path but my investigative side took over; my enquiring mind told me to see where it led.

It led me here.

I ran so far and so fast that by the time the play-list had ended on my iPod I looked around and didn’t recognise the landscape. I was surrounded by a thick mist and was high up in what seemed like a pine-tree-covered mountain. The trees stood erect, needles to attention, immediately on the defensive like a hedgehog under threat. I slowly lifted the earphones from my ears, my panting echoing around the majestic mountains, and I knew immediately that I was no longer in the small town of Glin. I wasn’t even in Ireland.

I was just here. That was a day ago and I’m still here.

I’m in the business of searching and I know how it works. I’m a woman who packs her own bags and doesn’t tell anyone where I’m going for a straight week in my life. I disappear regularly, I lose contact regularly, no one checks up on me and I like it that way. I like to come and go as I please. I travel a lot to the destinations of where the missing were last seen, I check out the area, ask around. The only problem was, I had just arrived in this town that morning, driven straight to the Shannon Estuary and gone for a jog. I’d spoken to no one, hadn’t yet checked into a B & B, nor walked down a busy street. I know what they’ll be saying, I know I won’t even be a case – I’ll just be another person that’s walked away from my life without wanting to be found; it happens all the time – and this time last week they probably would have been right.

I’ll eventually belong to the category of disappearance where there is no apparent danger to either the missing person or the public: for example, persons aged eighteen and over who have decided to start a new life. I’m thirty-four, and in the eyes of others have wanted out for a long, long time now.

This all means one thing: that right now nobody out there is even looking for me.

How long will that last? What happens when they find the battered, red 1991 Ford Fiesta along the estuary with a packed bag in the boot, a missing persons file on the dashboard, a cup of, by then, cold not yet sipped coffee and a mobile phone, probably with missed calls, on the car seat?

What then?

5

Wait a minute.

The coffee. I’ve just remembered the coffee.

On my journey from Dublin, I stopped at a closed garage to get a coffee from the outside dispenser and he saw me; the man filling his tyres with air saw me.

It was out in the middle of nowhere, in the midst of the countryside at five fifteen in the morning when the birds were singing and the cows mooing so loudly I could barely hear myself think. The smell of manure was thick but sweetened with the scent of honeysuckle waving in the light morning breeze.

This stranger and I were both so far from everything but yet right in the middle of something. The mere fact that we were both so completely disconnected from life was enough for our eyes to meet and feel connected.

He was tall but not as tall as I; they never are. Five eleven, with a round face, red cheeks, strawberry-blond hair, and bright blue eyes I felt I’d seen before, which looked tired at the early hour. He was dressed in a pair of worn-looking blue denims, his blue and white check cotton shirt crumpled from his drive, his hair dishevelled, his jaw unshaven, his gut expanding as his years moved on. I guessed he was in his mid-to-late thirties, although he looked older, with stress lines along his brow and laughter lines … no, I could tell from the sadness emanating from him that they weren’t from laughter. A few grey hairs had crept into the side of his temples, fresh on his young head, every strand the result of a harsh lesson learned. Despite the extra weight he looked strong, muscular. He was someone who did a lot of physical work, my assumption backed up by the heavy work boots he wore. His hands were large, weather-beaten but strong. I could see the veins on his forearms protruding as he moved, his sleeves rolled up messily to below his elbows as he lifted the air pump from its stand. But he wasn’t going to work, not dressed like that, not in that shirt. For him this was his good wear.

I studied him as I made my way back to my car.

‘Excuse me, you dropped something,’ he called out.

I stopped in my tracks and looked behind me. There on the tarmac sat my watch, the silver glistening under the sun. Bloody watch, I mumbled, checking to see that it wasn’t damaged.

‘Thank you,’ I smiled, sliding it back onto my wrist.

‘No problem. Lovely day, isn’t it?’

A familiar voice to match the familiar eyes. I studied him for a while before answering. Some guy I’d met in a bar previously, a drunken fling, an old lover, a past colleague, client, neighbour or school friend? I went through the regular checklist in my mind. There was no further recognition on either side. If he wasn’t a previous fling, I was thinking I’d like to make him one.

‘Gorgeous.’ I returned the smile.

His eyebrows rose in surprise first and then fell again, his face settling in obvious pleasure as he understood the compliment. But as much as I would have loved to stay and perhaps arrange a date for sometime in the future, I had a meeting with Jack Ruttle, the nice man I had promised to help, the man I was driving from Dublin to Limerick to see.

Oh, please, handsome man from the garage that day, please remember me, wonder about me, look for me, find me.

Yes, I know; another irony. Me, wanting a man to call? My parents would be so proud.

6

Jack Ruttle trailed slowly behind an HGV along the N69, the coast road, which led from North Kerry to where he lived in Foynes, a small town in County Limerick, a half-hour’s drive from Limerick city. It was five a.m. as he travelled the only route to Shannon Foynes Port, Limerick’s only seaport. Staring at the speedometer, he telepathically urged the truck to go faster while he gripped the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles turned white. Ignoring the advice of the dentist he had seen just the previous day in Tralee, he began to grind his back teeth. The constant grinding was wearing down his teeth and weakening his gums, causing his mouth to throb and ache. His cheeks were red and swollen, and matched his tired eyes. He’d left the friend’s couch he was sleeping on in Tralee to drive home through the night. Sleep wasn’t coming easily to him these days.

‘Are you under any stress?’ the dentist had asked him while studying the inside of Jack’s mouth.

An open-mouthed Jack had swallowed a curse and fought the urge to clamp his teeth down on the white surgical finger in his mouth. Stressed wasn’t even the word.

His brother Donal had disappeared on his twenty-fourth birthday after a night out with friends in Limerick city. After a late-night snack of burger and chips in a fast-food café he had separated himself from his friends and staggered off alone. The chipper was too packed for any particular person to be noticed; his four friends were too drunk and too distracted by their attempts to bring a female home for the night to care.

CCTV showed him taking €30 out of an ATM on O’Connell Street at 3.08 a.m. on a Friday night, and later he was caught on camera stumbling in the direction of Arthur’s Quay. After that, his trail was lost. It was almost like his feet had left the earth and he’d floated up towards the sky. Jack prepared himself for the fact that in a way, maybe he had. His death was a concept he knew he could eventually accept if only there was a shred of evidence to support it.

It was the not-knowing that tortured him; the worry and fear that kept him awake every night and the inconclusive search of the Gardaí that fuelled his continuous quest. He had combined his trip to the dentist in Tralee with a visit to one of Donal’s friends who had been with him the night he went missing. Like the rest of the crowd that were there that night, he was a person Jack felt like punching and hugging all at the same time. He wanted to shout at him, yet console him for his loss of a friend. He never wanted to see him again, yet he didn’t want to leave his side in case he remembered something – something he’d previously forgotten that would suddenly be the clue they were all looking for.

He stayed awake at nights looking through maps, rereading reports, double-checking times and statements while, beside him, Gloria’s chest rose and fell with her silent breathing, her sweet breath sometimes blowing the corners of his papers as her sleeping world crept in on his.

Gloria, his girlfriend of eight years, always slept. She had slept soundly through the entire year of Jack’s horrid nightmare, and still she dreamed. Still she had hopes for tomorrow.

She had fallen into a deep sleep after hours spent at the garda station, the first day they worried about not hearing from Donal after four days of silence. She slept after the Gardaí had spent the day searching the river for his body. She slept after the day they’d spent hours attaching photos of Donal to shop windows, supermarket notice boards and lampposts. She slept the night they thought they had found his body down an alley in the town and slept the next night when they discovered it wasn’t him. She slept the night the Gardaí said there was nothing more they could do after months of searching. She slept the night of his mother’s funeral, after seeing the coffin of a grief-stricken mother being lowered into the dirt, to join her husband at long last after twenty years in this life without him.

It frustrated Jack, but he knew it wasn’t a lack of caring that caused Gloria’s lids to close. He knew this because she held his hand when they sat through the questions at the garda station that first time. She stood beside him as the wind and rain lashed at their faces, by the river, watching the divers appear on the surface of the grey murky water with faces more gloomy than when they had disappeared to the world below. She had helped him stick posters of Donal to windows and poles. She had held him tightly when he cried the day the Gardaí stopped looking and she stood in the front row of the church and waited for him while he helped carry his mother’s coffin to the altar.

She cared all right, but one year on, she still slept at night during the longest hours of his life. The hours when Jack cared most about everything but the hours when, deep in her sleep, Gloria didn’t and couldn’t care at all. Every night he felt the distance grow between her world and his.

He didn’t tell her about coming across the woman, Sandy Shortt, from the missing persons agency in the Golden Pages. He didn’t tell her he had called her. He didn’t tell her about the late-night phone calls all last week and the new sense of hope this woman’s determination and belief had filled his head and heart with.

And he didn’t tell her that they had arranged to meet on this very day in the next town because … well, because she was sleeping.

Jack finally managed to overtake the long vehicles, and as he neared home he found himself alone on the now quiet country road in his twelve-year-old rusting Nissan. The interior of his car was silent. Over the past year he found he was intolerant of unwanted noise; the sound of a TV or a radio in the background was merely a distraction to his pursuit of answers. Inside his mind was manic: shouting, screaming, replays of previous conversations, imaginings of future ones all leaped around his head like a bluebottle trapped in a jam jar.

Outside the car the engine roared, the metal rattled, the wheels bounced and fell over every pothole and bump in the surface. His mind was noisy in the silent car, his car clattered in the quiet countryside. It was five fifteen on a sunny Sunday morning in July and he needed to stop for air, for his lungs and for the front deflated wheel.

He pulled over at the deserted petrol station, which would be closed until later in the morning, and parked beside the air pump. He allowed the birdsong to fill his head temporarily and push out his thoughts while he rolled up his sleeves and stretched his limbs from the long journey. The bluebottle momentarily settled.

Beside him a car pulled up and parked. The population of the area was so small he could spot an alien car a mile away … and the Dublin licence plate gave it away too. Out of the tiny battered car, two long legs dressed in grey sweatpants appeared, followed by a long body. Jack stopped himself from gawking but from the corner of his eye he watched the curly-black-haired woman taking long strides to the coffee dispenser by the door of the shuttered garage. He was surprised that someone of her height could even fit into the small car. He noticed something fall from her hand and heard the sound of metal against the ground.

‘Excuse me, you dropped something,’ he called out.

She looked behind her in confusion and walked back to where the metal was glistening on the ground.

‘Thank you,’ she smiled, sliding what looked like a bracelet or a watch onto her wrist.

‘No problem. Lovely day, isn’t it?’ Jack felt the pain in his swollen cheeks worsen as they lifted in a smile.

Her green eyes sparkled like emeralds against her snow-white skin and glinted as they caught the sunlight streaming through the tall trees. Her jet-black curls twirled around her face playfully, revealing parts of her features, hiding others. She looked him up and down, taking him in as though analysing every inch of him. Finally she raised an eyebrow. ‘Gorgeous,’ she replied, and returned the smile. She, her jet-black curly hair, the Styrofoam cup of coffee, legs and all, disappeared into the tiny car like a butterfly into a Venus flytrap.

Jack watched the Ford Fiesta drive into the distance, wanting her to have stayed, and once again he noted how things between him and Gloria, or perhaps just his feelings for her, were changing. But he hadn’t time to think about that now. Instead he returned to his car and leafed through his files in preparation for his meeting later that morning with Sandy Shortt.

Jack wasn’t religious; he hadn’t been to church for over twenty years. In the last twelve months he had prayed three times. Once for Donal not to be found when they were searching the river for his body, the second time for the body in the alley not to be him, and the third time for his mother to survive her second stroke in six years. Two out of three prayers had been answered.

He prayed again today for the fourth time. He prayed for Sandy Shortt to take him from the place he was in and to be the one to bring him the answers he needed.

7

The porch light was still on when Jack arrived home. He insisted on it being left on all night for Donal’s sake, as a beacon to guide his brother home. He turned it off now that it was bright outside and tiptoed around the cottage quietly, careful not to wake Gloria, who was enjoying her Sunday lie-in. Scouring through the linen basket of dirty clothes, he grabbed the least crumpled garment he could find and quickly changed out of one check shirt and into another. He hadn’t washed as he didn’t want the electric shower and ceiling fan in the bathroom to wake her. He’d even held back from flushing the toilet. He knew it wasn’t his overflowing generosity that was causing him to behave that way and yet he couldn’t quite summon the shame in knowing that it was exactly the opposite. He was deliberately keeping his meeting with Sandy Shortt a secret from Gloria and the rest of his family.

It was as much to help them as it was to help him. In their hearts, they were beginning to move on. They were trying their utmost to settle back into their lives after the major upheaval and upset of suffering the loss of not one but two family members in one year. Jack understood their positions, they had all reached a point where no more days off work could be taken, sympathetic smiles were being replaced by everyday greetings, and conversations with neighbours were returning to normal. Imagine, people were actually talking about other things and not asking questions or offering advice. Cards filled with comforting words had stopped landing on his doormat. People had gone back about their own lives, employers had moved around shifts as much as possible and now it was back to business for all concerned. But to Jack it felt wrong and awkward for life to resume without Donal.

Truthfully it wasn’t Donal’s absence that held Jack back from joining his family in bravely carrying on with the rest of his life. Of course he missed him but, as with the death of his mother, he could and would eventually get through the grief. Instead it was the mystery that surrounded his disappearance; all the unanswered questions left question marks dotting his vision like the aftermath of flash photography.

He closed the door behind him to the cluttered one-bedroom bungalow where he and Gloria had lived for five years. Just like his father, Jack had worked as a cargo handler at Shannon Foynes Port his entire working life.

He had chosen Glin village, thirteen kilometres west of Foynes, for the meeting with Sandy Shortt as it was a place none of his family inhabited. He sat in a small café at nine a. m., a half-hour before they were due to meet. Sandy had said on the phone that she was always early and he was eager, fidgety and more than willing to give this fresh idea a go. The more time they had together, the better. He ordered a coffee and stared at the most recent photograph of Donal on the table before him. It had been printed in almost every newspaper in Ireland and seen on notice boards and shop windows for the past year. In the background of the photo was the fake white Christmas tree his mother had set up in the living room every year. The baubles caught the flash of the camera and the tinsel twinkled. Donal’s mischievous smile grinned up at Jack as though he was taunting him, daring him to find him. Donal had always loved playing hide-and-seek as a child. He would stay hidden for hours if it meant winning. Everyone would become impatient and declare loudly that Donal was the winner just so that he could leave his place with a proud beaming smile. This was the longest search Jack had ever endured and he wished his brother would come out of his hiding place now, show himself with that proud smile and end the game.

Donal’s blue eyes, the only similar feature between the two brothers, sparkled up at Jack and he almost expected him to wink. No matter how long and hard he had stared at the photograph, he couldn’t inject any life into it. He couldn’t reach into the print and pull his brother out; he couldn’t smell the aftershave he used to engulf himself in, he couldn’t ruffle his brown hair and ruin his hairstyle as he annoyingly had, and he couldn’t hear his voice as he helped their mother around the house. One year on he could still remember the touch and smell of him, though unlike the rest of his family, to him the memory alone wasn’t enough.

The photo had been taken the Christmas before last, just six months before he went missing. Jack used to call round to his mother’s house once a week, where Donal was the only one of six siblings who remained living there. Apart from the habitual short casual conversations between Jack and Donal that lasted for no more than two minutes at a time, that Christmas was the last occasion Jack had spoken to Donal properly. Donal had given him the usual present of socks and Jack had given him the box of handkerchiefs his oldest sister had given him the year before. They’d both laughed at the thoughtlessness of their gifts.

That day, Donal had been animated, happy with his new job as a computer technician. He’d begun it in September after graduating from Limerick University; a ceremony at which their mother had almost toppled off her chair such was the weight of her pride for her baby. Donal had spoken confidently about how he enjoyed the work and Jack could see how much he had matured and become more comfortable after leaving student life behind.

They had never been particularly close. In the family of six children, Donal was the surprise baby, nobody more surprised than their mother, Frances, who was forty-seven at the time she learned of the pregnancy. Being twelve years older than Donal meant that Jack had moved out of home by the time Donal was six. He lost out in knowing the secret sides to his brother that only living with someone brought, and so for eighteen years they had been brothers, but not friends.

Jack wondered, not for the first time, if he had known Donal better, whether he could have solved part of the mystery. Maybe if he’d worked harder at getting to know his little brother or had had more conversations about something rather than nothing, then perhaps he could have been out with him on the night of his birthday. Maybe he could have prevented him from leaving that fast-food restaurant or maybe he could have left with him and shared a taxi.

Or maybe Jack would have found himself in the same place as Donal was right now. Wherever that place was.

8

Jack slugged back his third cup of coffee and looked at his watch.

Ten fifteen.

Sandy Shortt was late. His legs bounced up and down nervously beneath the table, his left hand drummed on the wood and his right hand signalled for another coffee. His mind stayed positive. She was coming. He knew she would come.

Eleven a.m., he tried calling her mobile number for the fifth time. It rang and rang and finally, ‘Hello, this is Sandy Shortt. Sorry I’m not available at the moment. Leave a message and I’ll call you back as soon as I can.’ Beep.

Jack hung up.

Eleven thirty, she was two hours late, and once again Jack listened to the voice message Sandy had left the previous night.

‘Hi, Jack, Sandy Shortt here. I’m ringing to confirm our meeting tomorrow at nine thirty a.m. in Kitty’s Café in Glin. I’m driving down tonight.’ Her tone softened. ‘As you know, I don’t sleep,’ she laughed lightly, ‘so I’ll be there early tomorrow. After all our conversations I look forward to finally speaking to you in person. And, Jack,’ she paused, ‘I promise you I’ll do my best to help you. We won’t give up on Donal.’

Twelve o’clock, Jack played it again.

At one o’clock, after countless cups of coffee, Jack’s fingers stopped drumming and instead made a fist for his chin to rest on. He had felt the café owner’s gaze on his back as he sat for hours waiting nervously, watching the clock and not giving up his table to a group willing to spend more money than he. Tables filled and emptied around him, his head snapped up every time the bell over the door rang. He didn’t know what Sandy Shortt looked like; all she had said was that he couldn’t miss her. He didn’t know what to expect but each time the bell tinkled, his head and his heart both lifted with hope and then fell as the newcomer’s gaze flitted past him and settled on another.

At two thirty, the bell rang once more.

After five and a half hours waiting, it was the sound of the door opening and closing behind Jack.

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